{"id":1013690,"url":"https://alion.io/job/merlin-labs-staff-engineer-world-model-development","title":"Staff Engineer, World Model Development","company":{"id":46278,"name":"Merlin Labs","domain":"merlinlabs.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/merlin-labs","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Lever","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":81,"open_postings":7,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.571,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":70,"computed_at":"2026-10-10T05:45:15Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Boston, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":185000,"max":325000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":325000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"LLM Evaluation","optional":false},{"name":"PyTorch","optional":false},{"name":"Sim-to-Real","optional":false},{"name":"World Models","optional":false},{"name":"Multimodal AI","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-17T16:36:07Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-17","last_verified_at":"2026-10-10T22:36:30Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":23,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":23},"description":"About You:\nYou want to build a model that understands what happens next. Not a classifier, not a chatbot - a learned model of an aircraft moving through an environment, good enough that a planner can imagine several futures and pick one. You are as interested in where your model is wrong as in where it is right, because in this application the second question is the one that matters.\nYou'll own the learned predictive models of the aircraft, its environment and other actors in it - and the rollout machinery that turns those models into evaluated candidate futures.\nResponsibilities:\nDesign, train and evaluate world models that predict the evolution of aircraft state, environment and other traffic under candidate action sequences.\nBuild the rollout and imagination machinery that lets a planner evaluate candidate plans against predicted outcomes before committing to one.\nOwn uncertainty: calibrated predictive uncertainty and out-of-distribution signals are required outputs of your models, consumed directly by the safety monitoring layer.\nCharacterize model validity boundaries rigorously - the flight regimes, weather, traffic densities and configurations where predictions can be trusted, and where they degrade.\nWork the sim-to-real gap in both directions with the Data/Sim team: train in simulation, validate against flight data, and feed discrepancies back into simulator fidelity.\nBenchmark learned dynamics against Merlin's existing physics-based models and flight-controls models; be honest about where the classical approach wins.\nContribute to the shared eval harness and hold the line on reproducibility: every result traceable to a data version, a config and a seed.\nQualifications:\nDegree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Data Science, Computer Engineering, Applied Math, or a related subject.\n10+ years building and training deep learning models, with meaningful work on sequence, dynamics, video or trajectory prediction.\nStrong PyTorch and a solid grasp of the training stack - distributed training, mixed precision, experiment tracking, debugging a run that has silently gone wrong.\nWorking knowledge of dynamical systems, state estimation or control; you can read a flight dynamics model and know what your network is and is not replacing.\nDemonstrated rigor in evaluation and uncertainty quantification.\nComfort with messy real-world sensor and telemetry data.\nNice to Have:\nModel-based RL, latent dynamics models or learned simulators.\nExperience with trajectory prediction in autonomous driving or robotics.\nAerospace background: flight dynamics, aircraft performance or air traffic.\nMultimodal fusion across vision, state and structured mission context.\nLogistics:\nWe welcome remote applicants for this role, with a preference for candidates based in or willing to relocate to Boston, MA for a hybrid work schedule at our HQ.","description_format":"text","description_chars":2871,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":{"level":"bachelor","optional":false},"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Hybrid work"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":true,"industries":["Artificial Intelligence","Drone AI"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-17T21:30:13Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":82,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.825,"p_room":1,"age_days":22,"expected_fill_days":70,"reasons":["conf:0","velocity","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-10-10T05:45:15Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":325000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/merlin-labs-staff-engineer-world-model-development","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/merlin-labs-staff-engineer-world-model-development.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-11T01:40:37Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":2470,"day_limit":5000,"remaining_today":2530,"minute_limit":60,"resets_at":"2026-10-12T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":46278},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=46278"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fmerlin-labs-staff-engineer-world-model-development"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fmerlin-labs-staff-engineer-world-model-development"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fmerlin-labs-staff-engineer-world-model-development"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/merlin-labs-staff-engineer-world-model-development\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fmerlin-labs-staff-engineer-world-model-development"}]}